Now make of Hannele what you will. Consider it as a plea against cruelty to children, as a strong pictorial proverb, anything. There is symbolism lurking in its situations. The Christ-idea of pity, an idea new to the pagan world, but not new to Buddhism, may be considered as the key-note of Hannele. Religious it is not. Blasphemous, however, in intention it is not, and one fails to see any similarity between it and Jean Beraud's picture of a Christ attired in nineteenth-century garb and with a modern Magdalen washing his feet. Hauptmann may tread on remarkably delicate ground at times; but his seriousness and artistic ingenuity have enabled him to produce a most poetic analysis of a soul and give it dramatic rhythms. To have the courage to give permanent shape to such a fantastic dream requires, besides imagination, marked technical abilities. To me Hannele seems like a huge chant to the glory of death. Death, "whose truer name is Onward," as sang the poet, is the theme, and Death is shown to be Lord and Master. Like Maeterlinck, Hauptmann tries to give emotion in the mass. You remember in L'Intruse and Les Aveugles, how everything is subordinated to the production of the one thrill--that of fear. By dissimilar method Hauptmann gets a similar result. He meets death with a grave sweetness. At first terrible as is the figure of the great Dark Angel, with his dread sword all bathed in greenish light, the Deaconess brings balm to the anxious, questioning soul of the child, and she meets death with dignity and submission. With some of the same gentle and elevated philosophy does Hauptmann approach his theme. The beggar child and her sufferings and dreams serve for him as something which he drapes about with wisdom and poetry. It is a reversion to the old miracle play cunningly blended with modern realism; it is this that makes its form seemingly amorphous, and renders it both a challenge and stumbling-block to the critics. From the old view-point such a play as this is not fit for the boards. It lacks action, and deals with states of emotion rather than with dramatic events. But a soul life can also be dramatic, and Hauptmann, who knows Parsifal well, has retained an admixture of realism so as to set off by violent contrast the exalted idealism of the later scenes. Jules Lemaître, the French critic, in praising Hannele, spoke of the persistency in us of early religious impressions, no matter how blurred they become by contact with the world. Oddly enough, this mixture of the real and the supernatural forestalled Gorky and his slum plays. Gorky himself could not have conceived and executed anything more poignant than the story of Hannele--"Petite sœur de la grande Brunnhild endormie aux rochers déserts," as Gabriel Trarieux calls her. A dream poem, a study in mysticism, Hannele evokes memories of Maeterlinck, though it "lacks the unity of his atmosphere," as an English critic has rightly said. But it is moving art, nevertheless.